"I want to work in a genteel profession"
People who use this reason probably don’t use the word ‘genteel’ but they definitely know what they don’t like: the prospect of a career in corporate America. They’d prefer to replace cubicle walls with oak bookshelves; coworkers with co-counselors; and TPS reports with memorandums.
You'll often find these people in Sports, Art, or Philanthropy Law classes, desperately hoping that there is a viable field more exciting than Corporate tax and less tragic than family law.
Some people imagine the profession of the law as being more of a gentleman’s club than a business, where problems are solved over cigars, brandy, and a game of backgammon while you just happen to get issued a check at the end of the month. Budgets, margins, productivity are just buzzwords for all those other jobs where it’s just “time to make the donuts”. The law, after all, is about pursuing noble goals, preserving sacred traditions, and inching us closer to a better society.
Guess what, Superman, the legal profession is not about “truth, justice, and the American way”. The legal profession is very much a business.
Corporate America may seem to be a bunch of mindless yes men who zealously defend their superiors’ and clients’ policies without regard to morality so long as their bonus is still promised. The legal profession is very different…they actually make you take an oath promising that you’ll zealously defend their clients without regard to personal morality or financial remuneration.
Corporate America constantly divides labor into salesmen, technicians, managers, etc, alienating the worker from the final product. The legal profession doesn’t subdivide tasks, however. Lawyers have to do all those jobs, find clients, do the legal research, manage cases, etc. After all this work, the only thing lawyers get alienated from is their families.
In corporate America you’ll be just some cog in capitalistic machine like other businessmen or women. In the legal profession you’ll at least be a name and maybe that name will even end up on the firm’s letterhead. This has got to count for something, to not be reduced to just a number. Doesn’t it?....It all depends on your total billable hours that year.
